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The ARM Cortex-A9 Can Beat Out The Intel Atom

Phoronix: The ARM Cortex-A9 Can Beat Out The Intel Atom

Here's some interesting test results recently uploaded to OpenBenchmarking.org that compares the performance of ARM Cortex A8 and Cortex A9 cores running at 1.0GHz against an Intel Atom N450. All three systems running at 1.0GHz were also running Gentoo Linux. Clock-for-clock, can the latest-generation ARM Cortex-A9 take out the Intel Atom? For the most part, yes.

This article is severely flawed...

Running multi-threaded benchmarks on a top of the line dual-core ARM setup then declaring that it is amazingly superior to an UNDERCLOCKED SINGLE CORE ATOM FROM ALMOST 3 YEARS AGO is not exactly showing that Intel is about to go out of business.

Larabel *repeatedly* misrepresents the N450 calling it a "dual core" processor. It is *not* dual core but is a single core + HT chip. He could have spent 5 seconds using this new thing called "Google" to go here: http://ark.intel.com/products/42503 and get a full product page describing the N450 that *clearly* shows it is a single core chip. I'd love to see the A9's "beating" the N450 with only one core....

Clock speed is useless, too.
Compare something relevant, like power consumption or price.

While I agree it would be helpful to see more info, clock speed is relevant when you consider that A9 is RISC, A9 systems tend to be cheaper than Atom systems, and from what I recall A9 is slightly more power efficient.

Clock speed by itself doesn't matter, as AMD has proven back in the Athlon 64 and P4 days. However, generally speaking, the higher the frequency, the more power consuming something is and the more heat it produces. Since ARM and Atom chips are designed to be low power and potentially fanless, being at the same frequency is a decent comparison, just to see which really is more efficient clock per clock.

@kano
Not true at all. Forcing something to go beyond its designated limit can't be compared to weakening something (or not pushing it to its limits). When you dumb down the Atom, that would actually give it the benefit, since it would be running cooler. That's like comparing a sedan to a F1 racer - its a lot easier to test road performance if the F1 slows down to the speeds of a sedan, since the sedan can't go as fast as the F1. If you want to make any semblance of a comparison, you have to compensate for the lowest denominator, not the highest.

Anyways back to the tests, anyone else find it weird that Atom under 64 bit overall did worse? Any particular reason for that?